影視英語聽力 第39期：Smart People 聰明人

中年男子勞倫斯是一名教授維多利亞時期文學(xué)的老師，他心地很善良，但是給人的印象卻尖酸刻薄，專橫暴躁。妻子去世后，他獨自撫養(yǎng)著兩個孩子。因為他的臭脾氣，兒子跟他變得越加疏遠，女兒也整天悶悶不樂。勞倫斯對此痛心疾首，卻也無可奈何。直到他愛上了自己以前的學(xué)生珍妮特，終于被迫開始改變自己，卸掉所有的偽裝，以求得到自己心愛的人。

對話文本:

Smart People is a new comedy directed by Noam Murro, from the script by Mark Poirier. Its impressive cast includes Thomas Haden Church, Sarah Jessica Parker and Juno's Ellen Page, but it's all really anchored by Dennis Quaid who plays a middle-aged English professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

He's a widower with two grown children and he is a first-class contrarian andcurmudgeon.

The character's name is Lawrence Wetherhold. He teaches Victorian literature. He's shopping around an unpublishable manuscript, attacking every other school of critical thought in the universe, and he's just basically a grouchy contrarian guy.

He has two grown children, one of them, who lives with him, his daughter, a high school senior, played by Ellen Page.

One day, his adopted brother, Chuck, that's Thomas Haden Church, shows up to sleep on his couch, try to borrow money, and just generally be a nuisance.

Also complicating Lawrence's life are the romance that he strikes up with a former student who is now an emergency room doctor. She's played by Sarah Jessica Parker.

Now the real charm of this movie is that the plot--it doesn't really matter as much as the characters. It's a wonderful collection of highly idiosyncratic, mildly ridiculous but very real and ultimately very touching and sympathetic people. And part of the point of Smart People is that, no matter how smart you are or think you are, you can still have trouble navigating the most basic decisions and choices in your life. And no matter how far along in life you get, you still face these basic questions--how are you gonna act, who are you gonna be, how are you gonna relate to the people around you, what is happiness gonna consist of for you. And what makes this movie, I think, unusually rich and subtle is that it faces these questions without predetermined answers, without a lot of sentimentality, and with a real feel for how people act, and talk and behave around each other.